My social media accounts are filled with pictures these days. Teenagers are heading off to college for the first time. Young adults are returning to campus to resume their studies. Pursuing higher education often requires moving and sharing a place with a roommate or two. Though the prospect of independence is exciting, learning to live with someone new is a growth experience. Under the best of circumstances, roommates may become the best of friends or at least suitable living partners. Since it is often easier to build a healthy relationship than it is to fix a broken one, the question becomes, “How do you cultivate a healthy living environment from the very start?”

In order to understand why religious families inadvertently and at times unintentionally create an environment where their children run to addictions rather than God as their coping mechanism, we must first begin by understanding the mindset of a child. When we look back on our childhood, we look back through adult lenses. Since then, we have grown by our maturity and life experiences, which may have distorted the truth of our childhood. Many of us carry messages that tell us we are bad children if we get mad at our parents or disagree with them. This message can have a profound impact on the way the person feels about himself or herself in adulthood. It is important to respect our parents but we can also have different opinions. A child needs to feel their opinion is important to their parents or the child may feel he or she isn’t important. Validating and acknowledging a child’s feelings is essential if they are to have self-worth. If children are afraid to share their true feelings and doubts in fear of reprisal then who can they trust? All of these messages set up the destructive entitlement that leads to addiction. It’s no coincidence that most addictions begin before the age of 18.

Rock band Linkin Park’s frontman, Chester Bennington, and Soundgarden’s lead vocalist, Chris Cornell, were good friends who’d toured and performed together. Unfortunately, their association recently became tragic, as Bennington committed suicide on Cornell’s birthday. This came not even two months after the Soundgarden singer took his own life.

In a world which is becoming increasingly reliant on the internet, exposure to the explicit sexual content lurking in its dark corner is inevitable. The fact that we have a world of information at our fingertips is as harmful as it is useful, especially to curious youngsters who are just beginning to become aware of their sexuality.

Adoption is a delicate process that comes with many different considerations. The relationship between an adopted child and his or her adopted parents is unique, and in many ways unlike that between parents and their biological children. It is difficult to predict how a child will adapt to his or her new home and family, so it is important to prepare for several different considerations about the mental and emotional wellness of adopted children.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD for short, is a mental disorder that is most commonly found in children between the ages of 4 and 17. Upon entering young adulthood, it is common for people who have been diagnosed with ADHD to grow out of it. But this is not true for everyone. Many young adults who were diagnosed with ADHD during childhood continue to struggle with it throughout their young adult life. Still, others who may not have been diagnosed during childhood can be diagnosed with late onset ADHD.

Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2015 showed that the most commonly used treatments for PTSD—cognitive processing therapy (CPT) and prolonged exposure therapy (PE) may not be as effective as those in the medical community had hoped.

Since the years of my internship, working with patients facing suicidal thoughts has been concerning, challenging, and inspiring. Individuals struggling with such hopelessness come to professionals in desperate need of relief from what is starting to feel like an inevitable outcome. Our responsibility as professionals is to be persistently and empathically interested in the individual’s struggle. Our curiosity gives them the courage to look at the very pain they fear.

Human beings make about 35,000 conscious decisions every day. Each one of those decisions, no matter how small, is likely to have an impact on someone, somewhere, in some way. But, we typically have no idea what kind of impact our choices have made on the world around us.

Excerpted from the book Changing Course by Claudia Black, Ph.D., Senior Fellow at The Meadows

Many times abandonment issues are fused with distorted, confused, or undefined personal boundaries. We experience abandonment when parents have a distorted sense of boundaries, their boundaries and ours. They want us to like what they like, dress like they dress, and feel as they do. If we in any way express differences from our parents, or make different choices than they would, we know we run the risk of rejection.